This is the official blog of Sgt Ellie Bloggs, a real live police sergeant on the front line of England. It's not the official opinion of my police force, but all the facts I recount are true, and are not secrets. If they don't want me blogging about it, they shouldn't do it. PS If you don't pay tax, you don't pay my salary.

Thursday, March 29, 2007

Let's get technical.

As a Woman, I am about to run the risk of an embarrassing faux-pas, for the lines that follow are about COMPUTERS.

Blandshire Constabulary is soon to join fellow forces in upgrading to NSPIS (pronounced "en-spiss", or in Blandmore "and-piss"). This magical system means that we will no longer have to duplicate information, type out files or send copies of charges to the courts.

The Home Office paid for most forces to join NSPIS, at a highly reasonable cost of £40m. They did this because the efficiency gained in police officers not having to type out files or photocopy everything hundreds of times would pay for itself in more officers on the streets.Here are some of the benefits of NSPIS:

Custody staff list all property items and "process" your prisoner for you (fingerprint, photograph etc). This will mean our suites will need three or four gaolers on at any one time instead of the current one. Naturally enough Blandshire has organised the recruitment of these gaolers in plenty of time and put money aside for them.

The charges are sent by computer to the Magistrates' Courts. No doubt the Magistrates' Courts will install NSPIS in good time for the "go-live" date, despite no sign that they are preparing.

The file is generated by NSPIS. Of course, as the circumstances will have been typed in by the custody sergeant rather than me, and will have changed since the arrest, I will probably want to update these before it is sent. I am expecting my NSPIS password and training any day now...

The file can be sent internally straight to CPS or the Courts creating a "paper-free" system. I am sure that dozens of Wi-Fi enabled laptops with electronic signature pads are just about to be delivered for us to carry around taking witness statements. No doubt the courts will also overturn a recent decision re-emphasising that statements must be handwritten or accompanied by handwritten notes to show that the correct model of interviewing was used to obtain it.

But the best thing about NSPIS is that as Blandshire employed a shedload of civilians last year to do most of our file preparation and court liaison for us, it will have absolutely no effect on frontline officers whatsoever. Which is probably why the Home Office has now withdrawn further funding, leaving Blandshire to pay for fixing all the bugs and kinks with their shiny new system.

We have had NSPIS now for years, I think we may have been first. But we still have to complete all the court files ourselves and enter the offence details while processing the prisoner ourselves. So no risk of the offence details being entered incorrect. The only part of the file that is produced by NSPIS is the MG4. I think NSPIS is pretty good most of the time, it updates PNC automatically with the charge and the 9A is all done online. And you can see at a glance from any workstation how many cells are free anywhere. who is in them and for what reason.For once they appear to have got something right.